Nintendo's Indie Program Leader Leaves Company

One of the biggest supporters and planners to help bring indie titles to Nintendo consoles has left the Big N after nine years of work.

According to Kotaku, Dan Adelman, who was in charge of Nintendo of America's indie program for just under nine years, has announced his parting of ways with the company. Adelman helped bring in numerous indie developers to negotiate deals to bring lesser-known gaming titles over to Nintendo's consoles. As you can tell by the Nintendo eShop's list of indie titles, Adelman was quite successful in rallying the small timers over to Nintendo. Shovel Knight was one of the best indie games to come out recently, debuting only on PC, Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.

"I think people were kind of on pins and needles about anything untoward I might say," Adelman said. "And every once in a while, I'd give an answer that people didn't like, and some people would freak out, so they tried to scale things back. First they had me do interviews with someone from PR or marketing. Later they just decided that I shouldn't be in the press at all anymore."

Last September, the Nintendo hit Adelman with a banhammer, forbidding him to use his Twitter, according to Gamasutra. Adelman was banned because of a Tweet he made where he mentioned his disapproval of the 3DS' region-locking. Since that incident, Adelman remained reclusive from speaking out in public until he left the company.

"I've been working with the indie community for almost nine years now, and one consistent theme I've noticed is this tension between developers following their passion to make the game they want to make and needing to be able to make a living doing it," Adelman said. "I've started having some conversations with a few developers, and it sounds like there's a lot of interest on both sides which is really fantastic."